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Shut up, everyone! My Internet browser heard the word "Fry" and opened up a video of Phillip J. Fry. It also opened my calendar to Friday and ordered me some French Fries
- Professor Farnsworth, Futurama

Casey: "I'm installing 'Cinema-OS', the operating system used in the movies."

Andy: "Any Downsides?"

Casey: "Yeah, it can't show any font under 72 point."

- Casey And Andy #163

Any computer interface that is designed to be seen on television, as opposed to actually be useful for the user.

Key tenets:

• All fonts must be huge and the resolution must be ridiculously low.
• All applications must be full screen - there is no multitasking on television.
• All makers of police database software must put extra effort in making the UI have pizzazz, consisting of distracting and superfluous widgets, animations and nonsensical bits of technical-sounding text and random numbers.
• The application interfaces must not conform to any established UI development standards. They must not share common interface conventions even between themselves (i.e., the facial recognition database cannot in any way function like or resemble the ballistics matching database).
• Superfluous animation and sound. When sending an e-mail, for example, it is useful to have an animation of the message folding itself into an envelope and flying off into the ether, accompanied by a synthesized woman's voice informing the user that the email is in fact being sent. When searching through any database (such as a fingerprint database), it is useful to flash an image of all of the search failures just to let you know the program is working (in real life, this would only increase the search time by a factor of 10).
• Passwords are never obscured by asterisks as they are typed. Passwords are always simple, non-case-sensitive English words, never a random combination of numbers and letters.
• Text being displayed, such as an incoming email, must appear on the screen one letter at a time, as if being typed in at that very moment. Sound effect optional.
• All computers running in a scientific institution display a spinning DNA helix positioned in a top corner at all times.
• Don't even think about using the mouse with a GUI (even if there is one provided). Instead you must make the clickity-clackety keyboard noises. Rapid Fire Typing if you're a "computer genius."
  • This troper had a computer science professor who had made a point of learning any pertinent keyboard shortcuts for software used in class and therefore rarely had to resort to the mouse for anything, so this can sometimes be Truth In Television.
  • This troper can tell you it's not computer geniuses, but accountants that don't use the mouse. I used to work for a company that makes financial software. Although this was software for Windows, the primary method of navigation was the keyboard because accountants don't like using the mouse while inputting data.
  • Allen Holub's Enough Rope to Shoot Yourself in the Foot even mentions forcing user to switch between keyboard for data input and mouse for control as a typical example of bad interface.
  • This troper also agrees that keyboard shortcuts are faster and also easier to explain to other people in instructions ("hit Control-k" instead of "find this icon, now right-click, go to this menu option..." But the point of using keyboard shortcuts is to minimize the amount of typing. The only computer systems currently in use that require a LOT of typing (and also are on antiquated enough hardware that the keyboards clickclackclack) are the ticketing systems used by the airlines.
    • That's why orthodox filemanagers are alive and well - it's just faster than anything WIMP-based.
  • This troper's computer science class requires that EVERYTHING be done via a unix command prompt. The only use the mouse has is selecting text, and sitting inside a window to keep it active.
    • This Troper believes that is, in fact, the quickest and most efficient way of doing things in unix/linux... provided, of course, you can touch-type. It is often much faster to hit alt+f2 and then type in the name of the program than to move your hand to the mouse, click the button that shows the desktop, wait for that to happen (if using a slow machine), find the appropriate button on the desktop and click it.
• If the interface talks, you can expect it to audibly announce every single function and command, no matter how impertinent or routine.
• Any kind of graphics manipulation software will be positively controlled with keyboard only, of which the amount of clickety noises is the sole factor determining the effectiveness of operation. All manipulation is done on rectangle areas, which get selected automatically and then zoom in to fill the screen, line by line. Arbitrary zooms and other image enhancements work instantly and on any input, a single pixel of source from a surveillance camera is just about enough to extract a hidden message written with a substance only visible in ultraviolet light.
• Computer equipment is highly sensitive to concerned looks, grunting hmmm's and crossed arms. Two or three people possessing the above, standing behind the person operating the computer will immediately unlock just the right functions needed in the software.
  • That must be how graphic editing programs can render five pixels into a recognizable image if someone stands there saying "Enhance.."
• Every operation for the computer brings up a titled progress bar. This bar will be enormous, color-coded, will obscure the entire screen, and will always say something like "Hacking Into Pentagon: 45% Complete"
• Computers can tell what type of file you have not just down to the file extension, but what it does, providing such prompts as "Downloading Virus" or "Uploading Medicine"

Often, a Viewer Friendly Interface is a front end for a Magical Database. Also, a Viewer Friendly Interface is often made of Beeping Computers.

For Science Fiction, however, We Will Use Micros In The Future. Contrast with Unusual User Interface.

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Examples:

• All the shows in the CSI franchise use an AFIS front-end that fits all the key tenets.
  • One specific episode of CSI used a highly graphics-intensive program that allowed the user to recreate a location and then set it on fire, for the purposes of investigating possible arson cases. Rather than just crunch numbers and return a near-instant result, it actually animated the fire in real-time.
  • It's taken to ridiculous extremes in the Spinoffs, which have computers that look like Star Trek with red and blue mood lighting. Even the font is similar.
  • One episode of CSI:Miami involved a gossip blog about a certain company. The blogger in question was secretly using spoiler text, thus, to distribute insider stock tips. When it is demonstrated, the tech shows his coworker an apparently cut-and-pasted blog post. He highlights the text and the tips become visible. Given that the interface segment in question was bright yellow-green text on an animated, mostly dark red background, this meant that either a)the blog happened to use the exact same formatting as the CSI interface, b)the web browser CSIs use automatically converted the spoiler text and made it invisible on the animated background until it was highlighted, or c) the tech deliberately reformatted the post for the CSI interface, instead of simply using the actual web page.
  • Although the original CSI is terribly guilty of color-coordinated (neon-blue on black, since you ask,) display-each-hit search screens, CSI: Miami is considerably worse. Whenever a suspect's information comes up on screen on glaring green over orange, it displays a blank form upon which letters pop in one at a time, Power Point-style, making viewers and investigators wait several seconds before reading anything useful.
• The highly advanced LCARS interface used in the Next Generation era of the Star Trek franchise is totally unwieldy and would be impossible for a real person to navigate with any kind of efficency. It would be particularly impossible for anyone to navigate the menu systems by touch, though we see users do this several times (most obviously in Star Trek The Next Generation, "Shades of Gray").
  • Of course, that hasn't stopped all manner of Trek-related games, programs, and websites from designing interfaces in the LCARS style. There's even a program to revamp your desktop LCARS-style, complete with a library computer.
• The G&G Network on Profit was designed with a punch-button interface (complete with a giant fake hand pressing the button on the screen), an organization system based on a slow-moving-but-cool-looking hallway theme, and only was able to depict people in cube-format... Still, it was cool how they exploded when people get fired.
• Norton's supercomputer in War Of The Worlds never seemed to show the same interface twice.
• Movie example: in Jurassic Park, Lex sees a graphical, 3D representation of a file system, which she immediately identifies as UNIX. Surprisingly, this actually is a real UNIX program, a Silicon Graphics file browser designed mostly to show off. But it seems unlikely that even the most dedicated young hacker (of that time) would have seen it, and it certainly is not visually particularly UNIX-like.
  • The book does away with this by presenting a basic command prompt. But, apparently, Michael Crichton enjoyed the movie interface, as the book for The Lost World uses a highly sophisticated mosaic display. Of course, this interface is a deliberate wink and nod at the uselessness of the movie's 3D display, since the resident whiz kid is unable to use it, it is horribly cumbersome, and it's actually just a severe distraction as the characters are trying to barricade themselves from the dinosaur attack.
• Real Life example(s): The menu interfaces in many modern videogames are often unnecessarily flashy, and are definitely Viewer Friendly. Rule Of Cool.
• Film Example: Bridget Jones' Diary, featuring messages displayed one letter at a time. This is actually real, if outdated. You can still find programs that allow for realtime chat that show exactly what is typed, when it's typed, but your average person wouldn't use one.
• Film Example: Hackers, in which the Gibson supercomputer represents the various virus and hacking activities with super-flashy 3-D graphics. It has been noted that many of the basic viruses and techniques demonstated are based on real information, horribly extrapolated; it has been theorized that the visual displays were a cross between making these highly technical activities interesting to the average person, and a kind of Lampshade Hanging.
• Bones frequently makes use of Angela's "mainframe", complete with Magical Database and holographic display (despite all this modern technology, the only colour it can display is green), although we don't see the screen of the stylus-controlled tablet device she uses for input. The tablet's interface must be pretty viewer-friendly, because she can create entirely new simulations on the spot with a few strokes of the stylus.
  • If this troper remembers correctly, she also wrote the software herself, despite being employed as an artist.
• Literary example: In the climax of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress, an NSA supercomputer graphically displays progress updates of its own intrusion.
• Film example: in Alien Vs. Predator - when this sort of thing would usually require a modicum of human intervention - a computer announces by way of bright red flashing that it's detected an "unusual heat signature" and then zooms in on the satellite photos of the source and generates a map which shortly thereafter becomes a plot point.
  • Admittedly, this is a computer getting a feed produced by the film's fictional Weyland Corporation, the founder of which is the "pioneer of modern robotics", but this takes place and was filmed in 2004, so this would have to be a case of Instant AI Just Add Water in that case.
• Webcomic: The geek-oriented User Friendly strip has an entire Story Arc focused around Miranda producing Movie OS that functions exactly like those described above, and then fails to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. Among other things, it was designed to have its entire security features disabled by typing "OVERRIDE".
• Webcomic: Casey & Andyhas a strip about Casey installing "CinemaOS" on his computer, the features of which he lists as the ability to "instantly access any devices, all programs work perfectly, and you can hack into incredibly secure networks". When asked if it has any downsides, he says "It can't show any font under 72 point."
• In some episode of some obscure Crime And Punishment series, the police browse some website in which some parts are confidential. When they try to hit one, a standard 404 error appears on the screen, a mere moment before a big, red, flashy "NO ACCESS" message appears on the screen.
• Mid-1990s television seems to be particularly suceptible to this trope; for example, the show Animorphs did this with regularity.
• Averted in an episode of La Femme Nikita, in which the series's computer geek, as Voice With An Internet Connection, first explains to Nikita how to find a process ID and then tells her to type in "kill -9" to make it stop.
• As the page image shows, the SGC dialing computer in Stargate SG-1 is remarkably flashy for something supposedly 'MacGyvered' together by military scientists and technicians to interface with advanced and unknown technology. It's impossible to show on a still image, but the Stargate glyphs are animated, flying out of the picture of the top chevron and into their cells. That said, the Ancients seem to have been addicted to fancy holograms, so maybe it's their influence seeping through.
• Iron Man embraced this trope with enthusiasm, though to be fair, this is Tony Stark's home and company..when an 'outside' computer was used, it used a mostly text-based interface, and unwieldy keyboard commands. (F5 then "i"?)
  • Must have been running EMACS!
    • F5 does nothing (is unbound) in Emacs by default, so I presume not.
    • As egregious as his home computer is, the computer program he used in the desert cave was remarkable realistic to this programmer troper. It featured C-style warning messages, as if he quickly threw code together without regards to "the Newest Standards."
  • This troper is ashamed to admit he has written code with such elegant interfaces as T then shift+M then . then shift+. The progress bar, however, is entirely Rule Of Cool.
• Firefly averts this somewhat with Serenity's rather simplistic and basic user interface. On the other hand, the interface in Inara's shuttle and the various Alliance computers are much more complex and gimmicky.
  • One episode (Trash) also subverts this trope. When Kaylee and Zoe are trying to install a new hardware part to change the direction of the trash shuttle, the screen shows a Windows 2000 "Found New Hardware" screen.
    • This editor assumed they just forgot to cover that with CGI.
• Averted in The Matrix Reloaded, where Trinity hacks the power station through a standard UNIX shell.
  • But also played somewhat straight: In the real world the interface to the Matrix is full of falling symbols which look very cool to the viewer but would be a rather ludicrous interface for a real user (even though a character tries to justify it in the first movie).
• Computer usability guru Jakob Nielsen has written a list of the Top 10 Usability Bloopers in the Movies
  • He should see Star Trek IV. It illustrates his point about the time travellers brilliantly.
• Averted in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, in which a high school club-room computer is very clearly shown to run Windows XP.
• Averted in The Place Promised in Our Early Days, in which Hiroki runs a Unix shell (it looks like tcsh) on the computer he uses to design his airplane.
• Uplink has a UI set at a resolution low enough that you can, provides highly visible progress bars for everything, scrolls a list of attempted passwords (complete with individual letters locking into place) when hacking, and an animation of dialing IP addresses.

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